Quotes of the day

posted at 8:01 pm on April 6, 2014 by Allahpundit

Can you hear the piteous weeping? The wronged tears? Those poor bigots are under attack. Those who are prejudiced against gay people are having their constitutional right to say so trampled. It’s a terrible injustice: you can’t believe that gay people are lesser without some pesky homosexual objecting and “bullying” you into believing that equality under the law is a venerable aim…

This conflation of the bully-turned-to-victim neatly clouds the admirable baseline mainstream America is edging towards: the “shame” axis around homosexuality has positively shifted from those who are gay to those who are anti-gay.

***

App developers Hampton and Michael Catlin, a gay couple, distanced themselves from Mozilla after Eich’s hiring, a move that helped bring Eich’s support of Prop. 8 to light.

“This really was a personal statement of boycott, and it seems to be getting carried as if we are organizing a boycott or that we think Mozilla is evil or that we think Brendan Eich is the devil. None of those things are true,” Hampton Catlin tells Beta News, which broke the story. “We just were hurt as developers who were committing our time and energy to their platform, that they would go pick someone with an unresolved anti-same-sex-marriage controversy. If he had apologized years ago, this would be a non-issue.”

***

The view that Eich was just expressing his opposition to marriage equality, a common stance at the time, strikes me as naive. Because Prop 8 is now dead, and because its passage was largely overshadowed by President Barack Obama’s election victory, it’s easy to forget the vicious tactics of the pro-Prop 8 campaign. Or, I should say, it’s easy to forget them if you’re not gay—because almost every gay person I know remembers the passage of Prop 8 as the most traumatic and degrading anti-gay event in recent American history…

This message of belittlement cut across pretty much every pro-Prop 8 ad—ads that ran incessantly in the state for months. The campaign’s strategy was to debase gay families as deviant and unhealthy while insinuating that gay people are engaged in a full-scale campaign to convert children to their cause. This strategy worked. And it worked because wealthy donors like Brendan Eich flooded the campaign with the money it needed to run ads like the ones above. Eich wasn’t just a casual opponent of marriage equality. He was a major contributor to the most vitriolic anti-gay campaign in American history, one that set the standard of homophobic propaganda that continues to this day. When we talk about Eich’s anti-gay stance, we aren’t just talking about abstract beliefs. We’re talking about concrete actions that harmed thousands of gay families and informed innumerable gay Americans that they were sinful, corrupted predators.

***

Oddly, however, I don’t see defenders of Eich also criticizing the Boy Scouts for excluding gay men because the organization disagrees with their conduct and beliefs. Nor do I even see conservatives taking Mozilla’s rights as a private corporation seriously—a predictable hypocrisy made especially obnoxious in light of last week’s widespread right-wing praise of the corporate plaintiff’s claim in Hobby Lobby. This is the conservative double standard in the realm of corporate rights: When the corporation supports a right-wing pet project—say, denying women reproductive care—conservatives pen encomia to the First Amendment’s corporate protections. But when a corporation dares to support a progressive cause like gay rights, conservatives cry foul at its alleged censorship of individual views.

It’s really no surprise, of course, that the right wing views Mozilla’s objections to Eich’s anti-gay activities as censorship and Hobby Lobby’s objection to birth control as religious liberty. We’ve known all along that conservatives’ quiver of defenses for corporate rights have only been employed to further its own agenda. The right wing’s backlash over Mozilla’s move only further proves that opportunism, rather than principled dissent, drives its frantic charge for full corporate personhood. Keep that in mind as the conservative outrage machine takes aim at Mozilla for daring to exclude a man whose values and conduct it finds unacceptable.

***

I get it. Brendan Eich is a bad man. So, don’t play golf with him, and don’t have a beer with him. You can even leave him off the invitation list for your birthday party. But, don’t hold all of Mozilla, and all of its employees, and the entire ecosystem of third-party developers who rely on the Firefox Web browser accountable just because you disagree with the views of one person who works at the company—even if he is the CEO.

Becker mentioned what she called a rebranding of the [gay-marriage] movement over the last five years, with two important components. First, gay marriage was framed in terms of family values. Second, advocates didn’t shame opponents and instead made sympathetic public acknowledgment of the journey that many Americans needed to complete in order to be comfortable with marriage equality.

There was no such acknowledgment from Mozilla employees and others who took to Twitter to condemn Eich and call for his head. Writing about that wrath in his blog, The Dish, Andrew Sullivan said that it disgusted him, “as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.” A leading supporter of gay marriage, Sullivan warned other supporters not to practice “a fanaticism more like the religious right than anyone else.”

I can’t get quite as worked up as he did. For one thing, prominent gay rights groups weren’t part of the Mozilla fray. For another, Mozilla isn’t the first company to make leadership decisions (or reconsiderations) with an eye toward the boss’s cultural mind-meld with the people below him or her. And if you believe that to deny a class of people the right to marry is to deem them less worthy, it’s indeed difficult to chalk up opposition to marriage equality as just another difference of opinion.

Some of the very same people who have jumped up and down with delight as Brandon Eich lost his job will doubtless be backing Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 if she runs. The “Ready for Hillary” ranks are crowded with gay men – and good for them. But it’s worth considering some consistency here. If it is unconscionable to support a company whose CEO once donated to the cause against marriage equality, why is it not unconscionable to support a candidate who opposed marriage equality as recently as 2008, and who was an integral part of an administration that embraced the Defense Of Marriage Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton? How do you weigh the relative impact of a president strongly backing DOMA – even running ads touting his support for it in the South – and an executive who spent $1000 for an anti-marriage equality Proposition?

Hillary Clinton only declared her support for marriage equality in 2013. Before that, she opposed it. In 2000, she said that marriage “has a historic, religious and moral context that goes back to the beginning of time. And I think a marriage has always been between a man and a woman.” Was she then a bigot? On what conceivable grounds can the Democratic party support a candidate who until only a year ago was, according to the latest orthodoxy, the equivalent of a segregationist, and whose administration enacted more anti-gay laws and measures than any in American history?

There is a difference, of course, between Brendan Eich and Hillary Clinton. Eich has truly spoken of the pain he once caused and owned up to it[.]

***

Yes, the culture war has been raging for a long time, except people didn’t notice it because it seemed to take place on the edges or in fringe settings. All the Eich affair did was make it obvious.

Ironically many people, even in the homosexual community, don’t want this culture war and are dismayed by the Eich witchunt. They don’t want it not only because … but I’ll get to that in a moment … especially since the Eich affair is not about gay marriage, except incidentally, any more than the Summers affair was about racism or feminism; or that Steyn’s suit has anything to do with warmism or denialism or the gunowners map was about school safety; or still less that the 2013 IRS persecution of Tea Party groups was to do with Citizen’s United.

The removal of Eich is about fascism. It’s about one group of people forcing everyone else to bow to their hat on a pole; it s about book burning, compelling obeisance to, as Jame Surowiecki put it, “a universal ideology” in a manner so bald that even those who might gain politically in the short term from it are horrified by its crudity.

Perceptive gays understand now, if they hadn’t noticed before, that a whole mechanism now exists for persecuting people whose views are deemed unacceptable. Today it is directed against Eich; once it was directed against Summers; on other occasions it was employed against Clarence Thomas. But sooner or later, probably sooner, they understand it will be directed against them — or us — or someone. And if it can get a corporate CEO who is widely regarded as the father of Javascript it can get pretty darned anyone.

***

Welcome to the Liberal Gulag.

That term may be perverse, but it is not an exaggeration. Mr. Weinstein specifically called for political activists, ranging from commentators to think-tank researchers, to be locked in cages as punishment for their political beliefs. “Those denialists should face jail,” he wrote. “You still can’t” — banality alert! — “yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You shouldn’t be able to yell ‘balderdash’ at 10,883 scientific journal articles a year.” “Balderdash” — a felony. At the risk of being repetitious, let’s dwell on that for a minute: The Left is calling on people to be prosecuted for speaking their minds regarding their beliefs on an important public-policy question that is, as a political matter, the subject of hot dispute. That is the stuff of Soviet repression…

“They think that to be a Fascist you must have some sort of shirt uniform, must drill and goose-step, must have a demonstrative salute, must hate the Jews, and believe in dictatorship,” John T. Flynn wrote many years ago. Mr. Flynn was an America First founder who had a high-profile falling out with the editors of this magazine back in 1955, but he offered some fruitful insights: “Fascism is not the result of dictatorship. . . . Dictatorship is the product of Fascism.” Mr. Flynn probably would not be surprised to see the Left coming around — again — on hating Jews, even if Occupy rituals have replaced the traditional pseudo-Roman salute. Their shirts come in many colors, but their true colors never change: an ugly, ignorant, power-hungry mob utterly committed to crushing dissent by any means it can. Mr. Weinstein and his ilk want to put us in camps, and crass totalitarians of similar stripe may be found everywhere from the executive suites at Mozilla to the halls of power at the IRS. It’s a shameful spectacle, and an unworthy one.

Breaking on Hot Air

Blowback

Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.

I fully expect your people to vote 90% for obama, Chioma, or whatever your name is.
But why U gotta be hatin’ on Romney, dawg? Don’t they teach you better in Sierra Leone or Upper Volta or wherever you came from?

Oddly, however, I don’t see defenders of Eich also criticizing the Boy Scouts for excluding gay men because the organization disagrees with their conduct and beliefs. Nor do I even see conservatives taking Mozilla’s rights as a private corporation seriously—a predictable hypocrisy made especially obnoxious in light of last week’s widespread right-wing praise of the corporate plaintiff’s claim in Hobby Lobby. This is the conservative double standard in the realm of corporate rights: When the corporation supports a right-wing pet project—say, denying women reproductive care—conservatives pen encomia to the First Amendment’s corporate protections. But when a corporation dares to support a progressive cause like gay rights, conservatives cry foul at its alleged censorship of individual views.

What can be said in response to this?

libfreeordie on April 6, 2014 at 9:02 PM

The fact that you took the time to answer “this” speaks volumes.

A+

PS, you ran away yesterday from my question to you in the Hot Gas Headlines thread about racism, where I asked you to comment on the Far Right Southern Poverty Law Center’s claims of Racism in the 50th State, aka O’bamaLand.

And would you also care to comment on how historically Elite Academics confidently told their Students/Cultists how the natives who would become Hawaiians were too stupid to sail all the way up?

g2m – Unfortunately, no, I didn’t see it. I’ll have to pay attention to when events like that come up. My vision is poor and I’d have to borrow my neighbor’s telescope in advanced. I enjoy photography and the camera lens allows me to see things I normally don’t. When I enlarge them on the computer, I find things I didn’t know were in the scenes. It’s a nice surprise sometimes. It’s nice to enlarge the pictures in the links that you post too.

I better get that telescope tomorrow! Thanks! I have a special place on an isolated road in the rolling hills nearby where I’ve gotten some moon rising landscape shots. Hope I have a chance to catch a good one tomorrow.

Thanks for both links. I plan to bookmark this one but have a question… what is the vehicle encapsulated with to keep the inside from erroding?

The clarity of the pictures are amazing. I remember watching the moon landing and kept wishing who ever was filming it would fix the fuzziness. Yep, pretty young then. I also remember listening to Carl Sagan, he seemed to make space science so understandable to the lay person.

1) DO you support what happened to Eich, and think this is promoting tolerance?

2) Do you support banning certain religions form every having a CEO position?

3) DO you think there is a snowballs’ chance in hell of a Mormon, Muslim, or Catholic of holding the Mozilla CEO job after this dust-up?

If you think #3 is anything but no, you’re deluding yourself.

If you answer yes to #1, and no to #2; you’re not being honest about what has happened. IF you support #1, then de-facto you support #2, because of the obviousness of #3.

Now perhaps the anti-Eich crowds is also all for not allowing any Catholic to hold any CEO position; regardless how they’d act in that position based solely on their religion.

But lets not call that “tolerance and diversity” while we do it. Lets go ahead and call that “discrimination and a call for segregation”… which isn’t any path to “diversity” I’ve ever heard of… it’s clearly heading in the other direction.

I used the wrong word. I should have used encased (?). I think you answered the question, 6061T6 aulm ally.
I know from previous studies the scientists know pretty much the atmosphere their equipment will be working in but … I still wonder how dependable the material they use is once it’s up there. And do rovers have back up systems if there’s problems with circuits, etc.

not at all.. ask ,, i’ll answer if I can
I was only in Pasadena for 32 months..

when it was bid ..the rover was 900 million
after years of work it was 1.4 billion…
JPL laid off people..
then at 1.7 billion…that’s the layoff that got me..
then they missed the original launch date in 2009..
since it is at its closest point every 2ish years
it finally launched in 2011 ..at 2.3ish billion..

I really like Broken Palace…
Even though I’m Californian and “observed” the ’60’s (didn’t partake), I’m just now exploring a lot of the music I missed back then.
Dancing in the Street was pretty cool too. I like Jagger and Bowie’s rendition too.

that’s only 7$ from each American….
cheap for the knowledge gained…I think.

as far as working there..
lets just say NASA is well versed in “Diversity” hiring..
even the contract house we all worked for was
a minority owned firm…as stated in the contract..
but for the most part….very cool place..great wood fired pizzas..

I’ve been trying to keep my chin up for the past 7 years. It’s getting harder and harder to do. I’m am relieved that my father, uncles, and all the other men and women of their generation, who fought in WWII, aren’t here to see what is happening to this nation.
This isn’t what they wanted for their Nation.

Well, g2m and kweca, and Lanceman, (if you are all still out there)it’s time to catch a few winks.

Tell me about it….long drive in this morning and a little worried as my son was driving 30 minutes behind me on his 40 mile commute to school. Switched out cars and gave him the safe one and I drove the widow maker!

One of the critical issues that we have to confront is illegal immigration, because this is a multi-headed Hydra that affects our economy, our health care, our health care, our education systems, our national security, and also our local criminality.

- Allen West

My take:Jeb Bush Praises Illegal Immigrants…Breaking Into Our Country an “Act of Love”

Well Jeb has a right to express his opinion…and that opinion makes him unfit for the presidency…so to quote Jeb…So Be it…

“During a three-day span the first week of April, 50 criminal illegal immigrants were apprehended by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a press release. The individuals were previously convicted of various charges including rape, sexual assault, possession of drugs, robbery, criminal trespassing, assault, and driving under the influence.
Enrique M. Lucero, an ICE field officer in San Antonio, said in a statement, “The results of this operation underscore ICE’s ongoing focus to arrest convicted criminal aliens who prey upon our communities and who chose to ignore our nation’s immigration laws.”
Nine of the captured aliens had previously been deported from the United States. Re-entry is a felony that can result in 20 year in federal prison sentence, according to ICE. One 56-year-old Mexican national arrested in San Antonio was previously convicted of sex crimes involving a child.
It is easy for one to wonder why–given these individuals’ serious criminal histories–the illegal aliens are not currently incarcerated.
Zack Taylor, Chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, said in an interview with Breitbart Texas that re-entry by convicted foreign nationals is unacceptable.
“It’s time for the U.S to get serious about immigration,” Taylor argued.
Taylor explained that there are many steps that the U.S. can take in order to deter previously deported immigrants from re-entering the country.
“We can start by taking away their incentives to be here,” he said. “All benefits: medical, food stamps, public housing, education, everything.”
Foreign nationals often do not share the same morals as U.S. citizens, Taylor said.

“People who live in other countries aren’t like us. They are usually born and raised under different conditions and have different values… Many of them have truly criminal minds. We cannot comprehend the type of punishment and isolation that these [convicted immigrants] need to have.”
Last month Breitbart Texas reported on a study conducted by Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County Sheriff in Arizona. Arpaio found that 31 percent of the released immigrants ended back in U.S. jails after being processed for deportation. The results suggest that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) may not be successfully deporting a significant percentage of arrested illegal immigrants.
Arpaio said of the results, “There are only two explanations. Either they’re out the back door [and] on the streets, with no action taken…They haven’t been deported, most of them. Or they have been deported, and they keep coming across the border.”
Many such illegal immigrants have been convicted of especially heinous crimes.
In March 2014, according to a Breitbart Texas report, 48-year-old Luis Gerardo Hernandez-Zanabia, an illegal alien and convicted sex offender, was arrested. Officers subsequently discovered that Hernandez-Zanabia was previously sentenced to six months in jail for sexually assaulting a child in Pasadena. In fact, he had been committing crimes on United States soil since 1986.
He had been arrested multiple times for entering the U.S. illegally. He was deported on April 19, 2006, and one time prior to that.
25 of the arrests occurred in San Antonio, 18 in Austin, and seven in Waco. The 50 apprehended individuals, 45 of whom were men, are citizens of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Canada, and Ukraine….”

Oddly, however, I don’t see defenders of Eich also criticizing the Boy Scouts for excluding gay men because the organization disagrees with their conduct and beliefs. Nor do I even see conservatives taking Mozilla’s rights as a private corporation seriously—a predictable hypocrisy made especially obnoxious in light of last week’s widespread right-wing praise of the corporate plaintiff’s claim in Hobby Lobby. This is the conservative double standard in the realm of corporate rights: When the corporation supports a right-wing pet project—say, denying women reproductive care—conservatives pen encomia to the First Amendment’s corporate protections. But when a corporation dares to support a progressive cause like gay rights, conservatives cry foul at its alleged censorship of individual views.

What can be said in response to this?

libfreeordie on April 6, 2014 at 9:02 PM

Geez, where does one start.

First, you’re back. You lied. But then, water’s wet.

Second, are you trying to invent some hypocrisy here? None exists with Conservatives once again being as consistent as it’s possible to be. To wit …

Hobby Lobby imposed nothing on anyone. No one was fired over their beliefs and no one did anything … except say Hobby Lobby has a right to it’s religious beliefs. And guess what, they happily coexist within their organization in spite of the outside influences trying to agitate them.

No one is saying Modzilla doesn’t have a right to have a themed political belief. We sure as hell took a stand about you firing someone over a differing opinion within that organization.

Same thing with the BSA. They are a non-profit organization dedicated to the task of making better American boys and men through Scouting. The gay communities objections to faith based beliefs in regard to morality is what the argument was about there. The same with atheists demanding access to a faith based organization and then undermining the very foundation of the organization.

Here’s there real theme and takeaway. You scorch and burn everything in your path that doesn’t bend to your will. You’re the tyrants and you know it.

One of the critical issues that we have to confront is illegal immigration, because this is a multi-headed Hydra that affects our economy, our health care, our health care, our education systems, our national security, and also our local criminality.- Allen West

Oh, in reference to Libby’s post. There is no such thing as diversity or tolerance when opinions/beliefs differ from his own. Terms like diversity and tolerance are only a tool to force others to live up to their standards while the folks preaching those concepts do not. In rules for radicals, Alinsky explains this in rule number four….”Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules”.

I have yet to met someone claiming out loud how diverse and tolerant they are, to be intellectually honest. In my experience they have a hidden agenda which is where the dishonesty lives. Now, I have met many folks who are tolerant of others and their differing viewpoints; just those folks don’t use their ideals like an 8 pound sledgehammer.

My opinion is that calling people “racist” is getting old (to the
people being called the term; not the name callers like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton) so the troublemakers (the ones trying to
ruin the country) decided to start calling us “homophobes” or
“intolerant”.

Personally, I thought Dennis Rodman in a wedding dress riding
on a motor cycle was hilarious. The thought of my next door
neighbor wearing a wedding dress, getting married to his male
lover on the court house steps wearing a rose in his lapel and
calling the person that I have always called Jeff his “husband”
while clinching him in a bear hug while tongue dancing – well,
I find it at the least uncomfortable and at the most offensive.
Additionally, this behavior sort of ruins the friendly, neighborly
backyard wine evenings.

Previously the whole neighborhood knew they were gay, however,
since they were not “in your face” about, none of us cared. It
was their business.

Unfortunately, now they have made it ours. And I fear it will not
go well. Gays are 2% of the population. Do they think these antics will increase their numbers? Do they think that children
influenced by gay school propaganda will all of a sudden turn gay?
From what I see the children of homosexual parents are made fun of
by the other kids (behind their backs). That can’t be good for their self esteem.

Gays want to be equal. Were they not pretty much equal already?
All this ruckus over a marriage license? Why aren’t they content
with a contract or being named in a living will or regular will?
As far as health insurance goes, anyone can take out a policy.

Thinking this through makes me wonder about something else. Why do you think you vote in a closed booth so that no one can see what you do? What would happen if everyone had their vote digitally recorded under their name in an open database? Obviously, many others would get the Branden Eich treatment.
But if I have the right to private voting, why do I not have the right to private donations to politicians?

I do think that much of the current sexual warfare/lawfare can be traced back to a coarsening of the heterosexual scene. Pushing “in your face” sex on screen, in music, books, magazines where there was choice as to whether or not to see same was one thing, but it metastasized into a condition where public display of private relationships became the norm, in the local park, diner, and street. If straights could do it, why not gays, so might the reasoning go. Stick-in-the-mud types inveighed against such a coarseness for a long time and lost the battle.

There are consequences to living life as if sexual satisfaction on your own terms is the be all and end all of happiness. That relationships should last only so long as they satisfied needs and desires make for relationships that are fragile and superficial and that do not look to the long term welfare of participants and innocent bystanders. Case in point – there were those who contended years ago that loosening divorce laws to a “no fault” scheme would result in an upsurge in divorce and worsen children’s lives, creating poverty in the wake of marriage dissolution; there is evidence that they were right. It appears as if many of those same people have somehow got it into their heads that redefining marriage will only exacerbate the problem. We’ll see.

My main question, though, is that the beginning of the push for gay marriage began with the Supreme Court finding a right to private sexual expression. Okay. Seems fair. But when and how did a private right morph into a right to societal approval and support? Oh, yes. See paragraph one.

I also would like to know why genital contact privileges certain relationships so that regardless of gender, marriage should be a right to secure the financial and emotional benefits that come with such a state. I want a “platonic partners marriage” (I’ll take a civil union) that would enable two sisters or brothers or friends sharing a life that includes financial, practical, and emotional dependence on one another to have the same right to “marriage” benefits as other “couples” in genitally involved relationships. Many times, in such platonic partnerships, there are surviving children or parents that are at the heart of their daily life. Why shouldn’t insurance companies, and businesses and the government not be required to recognize such needs and emotionally based relationships? Why shouldn’t compensation and tax schemes recognize that maybe the singleton would like to put their NGISO (non genitally involved significant other) onto an insurance policy or get discounted college courses, or make use of recreational facilities, or inherit worldly goods without needing a will or contract? Wouldn’t that be fair?